Byung-Hun Min, Des oiseaux, 2020

The silence and simplicity of nature, the feeling of passing time are made visible. The photographs of Korean Byung-Hun Min, taken across the world between 1998 and 2020, have the evanescence of a pencil drawing: low contrast, playing with silky tones, they seem to show a fleeting moment between clarity and dissolution. Min’s birds inhabit an impalpable space. They seem to be wrapped in a white veil, in a silvery light. The almost monochrome image, the uniformity of tones oscillating between white and grey, the absence of perspectives and contrasts, the simplicity of the construction and the minimalism of the forms restore a reality that has become fantastic. The long work involved in printing the negatives allows the photographer to render not only what he has seen but also perceived. Min’s birds invite contemplation.

This book is part of the Birds collection which celebrates, through the eyes of various artists, their immense presence in a world where they are today weakened. Ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre offers a unique essay to accompany each set of photographs. For this work, he is interested in the relationship between man and bird from the first representations of prehistory to the domestication of certain species, to the bird as a hunting instrument until the pure observation of this inexhaustible subject of study and wonder. The titles of the collection include: Albarrán Cabrera, Graciela Iturbide, Leila Jeffreys, Michael Kenna, Yoshinori Mizutani, Bernard Plossu, Pentti Sammallahti and Terri Weifenbach.